Egyptian Celebrities: Scientists, Writers, Politicians, and Actors - Article Example

?Egyptian Celebrities: Scientists, Politicians, and Actors: In this article we’ll try to have a look on the major personalities of Egypt in the field of Science, Showbiz, Literature and the Politics and we’ll try to discuss their life in short and their relation if there exists some or in the other case their views about the revolution in the Egypt and what’s their opinion regarding the former President Mubarik. 1. SCIENTISTS: a) Prof. Muhammad ElBaradei He was born in Cairo, the capital of Egypt. His father who was the president of the Egyptian Bar Association was not having best of relations with President at that time i.e. Jamal Abdul Nassir and under the supervision of his father, Baradei completed his law degree from the University of Cairo in 1962. He then became the member of his country’s mission in the UN at the stations of New York and Geneva, while serving at the UN; he also continued his education at New York University School of Law and did his doctorate in International Law in 1974. After the completion of his PhD, he was appointed as the special assistant to the Foreign Minister of Egypt and during his tenure at this post, he was the member of the Egyptian negotiators who had talks with Israel at Camp David and reached the historic peace treaty. He left the department of diplomats of Egypt in 1980 and from 1981 to 1987; he acted as the Professor of International Law at New York University along with his post as a senior fellow in charge of the International Law Program of UN. He joined UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 1984 as a senior staff member and then he became the legal advisor of IAEA and then the Assistant Director General for the external relations. In the early 90’s, he was sent to Iraq to demolish the country’s nuclear weapons program and his fellows in his leadership destroyed the laboratories in Iraq. In 1997, he became the president of IAEA and the very next year, Saddam Hussain expelled the weapons inspector from Iraq. After the incidence of 9/11, Bush regime insisted Iraq to comply with the UN weapon inspection team, and when the team reached there, they found no trace of the nuclear weapons but Bush regime was of the view that Iraq was buying uranium from Africa and in support of this argument, the American government presented a document in the UN which validated their allegation but later on IAEA proved that document to be a fraud and ElBaradei dismiss that document in the security council of UN. And his evaluation regarding Iraq’s nuclear program proved to be correct later on. According to some sources, his reappointment as president IAEA was opposed by Bush Regime and his calls in Vienna were taped by the members of CIA. He and IAEA was awarded the 1995 Nobel prize for peace due to his efforts in controlling the use of nuclear energy for military proposes as well as his struggle in using the nuclear energy for the civil proposes with maximum possible safety. In 2010, he set the foundation of National Association for Change which started working for the democratic reforms in the Egypt. During this moment, he himself was considered as a strong presidential candidate but he refused any such possibility unless the guarantee of free elections in Egypt, when Mubarik regime refused to have talks with them then he went to Vienna on a self imposed exile. In 2011, a revolution shocked the foundations of Mubarik government in Egypt and as a result all his allies left him alone and the people came in the streets of Cairo demanding the government to resign, and at that time ElBaradei returned back to Egypt to support this moment and then there were rumors that he was house arrested but then he reappeared and broke the restrains of curfew and emerged as the leader of opposition and this moment finally resulted in the end of the rule of Mubarik which spans around 30years. b) Prof. Farouk Elbaz He is a professor of research and also the director of the center for remote sensing at the Boston University and in the past he was the advisor to the president of Egypt (Anwar Sadat) for Science for three years i.e. 1978 to 1981 and played a key part in the research and development of the science education in Egypt. He is a renowned geologist of Egypt and has been the part of many major projects of geology all around the world. The field which is considered as his specialty is “The Desert Studies” and he is famous for his continuous work in the field of space photography which is very useful in determining the location of underground water resources. He was born in 1938 in the town of delta, and at the moment he is the director of different sub departments of Geology at the University of Boston. He was also the part of Apollo program which took place from 1967 to 1972. He did his B.Sc in chemistry and geology from Ain Shams University, Cairo, in 1958 followed by an MS and a PhD degree in geology from the University of Missouri –Rolla. He had been teaching geology at different universities for several years. In the year 1989, he was awarded an honorary degree of doctorate in science from the New England College, New Hampshire, and USA. He was the part of Apollo program for six years and during this time period; he was acting as the secretary of the site selection committee for the landings at the surface of the moon. In addition to this, during this period; he was also the Chairman of the astronaut training group and was the focal person for the visual observation and the photography from the moon. From 1973-1983, he founded and then chair the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies which was the part of National Air and Space Museum at Washington DC. He is the president of the Arab Society of Desert Research and he has received many distinctive awards whose details are given below; 1. NASA's Apollo Achievement Award; 2. Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal and Special Recognition Award; 3. The Certificate of Merit of the World Aerospace Education Organization; 4. The Arab Republic of Egypt Order of Merit - First Class; 5. 1989 Outstanding Achievement Award of the Egyptian American Organization; 6. The 1992 Award for Public Understanding of Science and Technology of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; 7. The 1996 Michael T Halbouty Human Needs Award of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists View about Egyptian Revolution: About the Egyptian revolution, Baz was of the view that the current revolution in the Egypt is due to the corruption and the imbalance of power from which Egypt was suffering for the last 50 years and he also said that the new government has the responsibility of making reforms in the system to combat the evil of corruption in the future as the garbage of corruption is spilling all around and it is not possible to get rid of all of this in a month time so detailed workout on the structural reforms is needed. He added that the real significance of this revolution is that it comes from the youth of the country, and he advised Egyptian youth to take care of their rights and to not to let anyone use them as a ladder to achieve their proposes so he advised them to talk to the government by themselves for their better future. c) Prof. Ahmed Zewail He was born in 1946 and he is an Egyptian American chemist who did a lot of work the field of chemistry especially Femtochemistry which used the aid of ultra fast lasers which can detect the character of atoms when they are undergoing chemical reaction in real time and he won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1999 for developing this rapid LASER technique to directly observe the atom’s characteristics when they are undergoing a chemical reaction. He grew up in Egypt and he did both his bachelor and master from Alexandria University Alexandria. He started his professional career as an undergraduate trainee in a petroleum company in Alexandria in 1966. He did his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1974 and then he moved to the University of California, Berkley, as a research fellow. He became assistant professor of chemical physics in 1976. In 1982, he became the full professor and in 1990 he became the 1st Linus Pauling Chair Professor of Chemistry. In 1998, he was awarded the “Benjamin Franklin “prize for his work regarding the introduction of femtoSecond which is the smallest part of a second and in the ceremony was present more than 1500 scholars and other dignitaries including Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford. In 1999, he was nominated for the Nobel prize for chemistry for his work on the rapid fast LASER which was able to observe the atoms directly during the course of a chemical reaction and he was the 1st ever Arab Muslim who won the Nobel prize for science. He currently is an Egyptian as well as an American citizen. At present, he is the Linus Pauling Chair Professor of Chemistry and the Professor of Physics at the California Institute of Technology and he is also the Director of the NSF Laboratory for the Molecular Sciences. Views about Egyptian Revolution: He has written quite a lot about the recent Egyptian revolution and he is of the view that revolution will take Egypt into a prosperous future and according to him, this revolution has no agenda like religion or some ideological basis except one and that was to have a better future for the country and the revolution was the result of youth thinking about their future. He said that the armed forces of the country has really played their role with honesty taking into account that they are the caretakers of their people so in that regard the forces acted in quite a reasonable way to guarantee the stability of their country. In his view point, it is the time which calls for some real and fundamental change and not just the change of faces and the need is to evaluate the factors behind this revolution and to work on this to have the best of future for their country. The people of the Egypt were fed up from the corruption, the succession of the power to the son of Mubarik and the last elections which gave the power to the political party of Mubarik with almost no opposition. Despite of the fact that there is some development in economy in the last few years but the poor and the middle class has not been able to benefit from this development, rather the culture of bribery prevailed too much in the country which made the people angry to an extent leading to a revolution. According to Zewail, the last nail in the coffin of Mubarik regime was the deterioration in the education system of the country. According to Zewail, the solution of these problems will be consisting of four main steps; I. A council of learned men and women should be formed who all should formulate the constitution of the country and a proper vision should be given to the people of Egypt. II. It should be ensured that the judiciary of the country is independent. III. Arrangements should be made for conducting a free and fair election of both the upper and the lower houses as well as for the president ship and these elections should be supervised by the judiciary. IV. A transition government with national consensus should be formed as soon as possible. 2. WRITERS: a) Naguib Mahfouz He was born in 1911 in Gamaliya quarter of Cairo; he was the youngest of a total of seven siblings. His family loved him quite a lot being the youngest son and religion was the major influential factor in his up growth. He was very young as compared to his other siblings, for instance the age difference between him and the 2nd youngest sibling was 10 years so he felt quite lonely in his childhood and it is shown in his writing also. He spent the 1st ten years of his life at his birth place and it is depicted in his realistic writing like Midag Alley and the Cairo Trilogy, Children of the Alley and The Harafish. The family house of Mahfouz has also left lasting impressions on his mind and it is shown by the model house of Abd al Jawad in one of his novel The Cairo Trilogy. He showed different places in the house and also the roof of the house which served as the place for family gathering as well as the meeting point of romantic couples. In 1920, his family moved to Abbasiya, which was a new district and its neighborhoods are also shown in the writings of Mahfouz and it was the place where he first fell in love with someone and it is shown in his novel The Cairo Trilogy. He was quite good in mathematics and sciences in his young age but he did his bachelor with philosophy as the major from Faud I University which is now known as the Cairo University. He wrote more than forty articles in different magazines and newspapers and all of these were having either philosophical or psychological basis and all of these writings were under the influence of Henri Bergson. For about 35 years he served on different posts in the civil departments. During this period, he had an opportunity to read the western literature which included Shakespeare, Conrad, Melville, Flaubert, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust, O’Neill, Shaw, Ibsen, and Strindberg. His first novel came into the market in 1939 and it was “Khufu’s Wisdom” and then he wrote about thirty four novels afterwards and in addition to these he also wrote fifteen collections of short stories and an autobiography also. He was stabbed in the neck by a religious extremist outside his home which resulted in severe trauma and then he was able to write for only half an hour every day and then he wrote fiction based short stories and their English translations named The Dreams and Dreams of Departure were published in 2004 and 2006. More than thirty of the Egyptian movies are based on his novels and short stories, he was the writer emeritus for Al-Ahram newspaper and he wrote weekly column for the paper continuously till sometime before his death. This column was published both in Arabic as well as in English translation. He received the Egyptian State Prize for two times for his writings and he also won the Nobel Prize for Literature in the year 1988. In 1989, he received the presidential Medal from the American University in Cairo and he was awarded the honorary degree of doctorate in 1995. He was given the honorary membership of American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1992 and in 2002 he was elected as a member of American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He died in 2006 in the age of 96 years. He left behind two daughters and wife. Books of Naguib Mahfouz Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth, Arabian Nights and Days, Children of Gebelawi, Echoes of an Autobiography, Miramar, Naguib Mahfouz at Sidi Gaber: Reflections of a Nobel Laureate 1994-2001. Books about Naguib Mahfouz 1. Naguib Mahfouz's Egypt: Existential Themes in His Writings by Hayim Gordon 2. Naguib Mahfouz: From Regional Fame to Global Recognition by Michael Beard (Editor), Adnan Haydar (Editor) 3. Naguib Mahfouz: The Pursuit of Meaning by Rasheed El-Enany 4. The Cairo of Naguib Mahfouz by Britta Le VA (Photographer), Gamal Al-Ghitani b) Nawal Alsaadawi She was born in October, 1931; she is a feminist writer of Egyptian origin, a human right activist, physician and a psychiatrist. She has written a number of books on the role of women in Islam and she had insisted much on the subject of mutilation of female genitalia in her country. During revolution in 1919, his father fought bravely against the king and the British forces. As a consequence, his father was sent on exile to a town in Nile Delta. Later on, she graduated from a medical school of Cairo University in 1955. During her medical practice she came to a conclusion that women of her country were suffering from different social, psychological as well as racial problems. During her job at her birth place she saw that the rural women of her country were facing hardships and different sorts of discriminative behaviors. As a consequence of protecting one of her patients form the violence at home, she was called back by the government to Cairo. Later on, she became the Director of Public Health. She published her famous book Al-Mar’awa Al-Jins (Women and Sex) and in this book she gave a detail account of different types of sexually aggressive behaviors which were being practiced against the women and one of these behaviors include mutilation of genital organs of the female. She was dismissed from the position of Director of Public Health due to her book as well as her political affiliations. She worked for the working women for about four years. She was imprisoned in 1981 by President Sadat mainly due to the opposition of the Camp David Peace Treaty with Israel. She was released from the prison after the assassination of Sadat. One of her famous quote which she wrote after her imprisonment was; "Danger has been a part of my life ever since I picked up a pen and wrote. Nothing is more perilous than truth in a world that lies." In the late 80s, she received life threats from the religious extremists and as a result she had to leave Egypt and she started teaching at different universities of America. After this till 1996 she has been the part of different prestigious institutions like Harvard, Yale, Columbia, the Sorbonne, Georgetown, Florida State University and The University of California. In 1996, she left America and settled again in Egypt. In 1996, she moved back to Egypt. There she in actively involved in human rights activities and she was the potential candidate for the 2005 Presidential Elections of Egypt but she withdrew at the end due to the non flexible requirements for the candidates who had been contesting for the first time. The Council of Europe awarded her with North-South Prize in 1994, Publications: (Arabic) Novels: Memoirs of a Woman Doctor (Cairo, 1958), the Absent One (Cairo, 1969), Two Women in One (Cairo, 1971), Woman at Point Zero (Beirut, 1973), The Death of the Only Man on Earth (Beirut, 1975), The Children’s Circling Song (Beirut, 1976), The Fall of the Imam (Cairo, 1987), Ganat and the Devil (Beirut, 1991), Love in the Kingdom of Oil (Cairo, 1993), The Novel, Dar El Hilal Publishers Cairo 2004, Zeina, Dar Al Saqi Beirut , 2009 Short Stories: I Learnt Love (Cairo, 1957), A Moment of Truth (Cairo, 1959), Little Tenderness (Cairo, 1960), The Thread and the Wall (Cairo, 1972), Ain El Hayat (Beirut, 1976), She was the Weaker (Beirut, 1977), Death of an Ex-minister (Beirut, 1978), Adab Am Kellet Abad (Cairo, 2000) Plays: Twelve Women in a Cell (Cairo, 1984), Isis (Cairo, 1985), God Resigns in the Summit Meeting (1996), published by Madbouli , Other four plays included in her Collected Works (45 books in Arabic) published by Madbouli in Cairo 2007 Memoirs: Memoirs in a Women’s Prison (Cairo, 1983), My Travels Around the World (Cairo, 1986), Memoirs of a Child Called Soad (Cairo, 1990), My Life, Part I, Autobiography (Cairo, 1996), My Life, Part II, Autobiography (Cairo, 1998), My Life, Part III, (Cairo, 2001) NON-FICTION: Women and Sex (Cairo, 1969), Woman is the Origin (Cairo, 1971), Men and Sex (Cairo, 1973), The Naked Face of Arab Women (Cairo, 1974), Women and Neurosis (Cairo, 1975), On Women (Cairo, 1986), A New Battle in Arab Women Liberation (Cairo, 1992), Collection of Essays (Cairo, 1998), Collection of Essays (Cairo, 2001), Breaking Down Barriers (Cairo, 2004) About the role of women in the revolution of Egypt she wrote; the women and girls of all the ages are standing with the male counterparts of their society, she said that they are fighting for the sake of justice, liberty and real form of democracy and they are demanding a new constitution for the country in which there will be no discrimination among the two sex and there should be no religious discrimination and free and fair elections should be conducted on the first priority basis. 3. POLITICIANS: a) Amr Moussa He was born in 1936 and after getting his degree in law from the University of Cairo in 1957, Moussa has been a part of diplomatic services in different capacities. From 1958 to 1972 he had been the part of Egyptian Foreign Service and served as ambassador to Switzerland as well as to United Nation. He became the advisor to the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Egypt in 1974 and remained on this position till 1977. He became the Egyptian Foreign Minister for the span of about ten years starting from 1991. He was selected as the secretary general of the Arab League in 2001 and many of the critics of Mubarik said that the selection of Moussa as the Secretary General was due to the President’s desire as Mubarik wanted him to be away from the sight of Egyptian people as he could be the potential threat to Mubarak’s presidency. In the mid of the last year i.e. 2010, he visited Gaza and asked Israel to lift the economical restrains on the part of Gaza ruled by Hamas. He was the 1st official of Arab League to visit Gaza after Hamas winning the elections in 2007. After the incidence of Flotilla raid, he said that the league of Arab nations will ask the Security Council of UN for the lifting of the economical blockade. When he was asked about the Egyptian revolution, he said that Arab League want a multi party democracy leading to a national government but he did not devise any time frame for this transition. When he was asked about his possibility of being the next presidential candidate, he did not deny the question so he remains the potential presidential candidate. According to poll conducted about the possible candidates for the next president, he gained the highest number of votes i.e. 26% of the casted votes in the poll were of the view that he should be the next President. The main reason behind this is his criticism over Israel regarding the issue of Gaza and the West Bank and also on the dual criteria of America who supports Israel in nuclear weapon program while does not allow Israel to continue his civil nuclear program. 4. ACTORS: a) Omer El Sharif He was born in 1932 in Alexandria in 1932 in a rich Lebanese-Egyptian family; he graduated from the University of Cairo with both Physics and Mathematics as his majors. He supported his father in the family business for a short period and then he started his acting career. His career reached the peaks in Egypt when he married one of the popular Egyptian actresses (Faten Hamama) and this marriage ended in 1974. He made his debut in English movies in 1962 in Lawrence of Arabia for which he was also nominated for the Oscar Academy Award for the Best Actor in a Supporting Role. His movies were banned in the Egyptian cinemas as he kissed a Jewish woman in his film. Around mid 70s, his career stated to have a downfall so he concentrated on one of his favorites i.e. bridge and nowadays he is known as one of the expert of bridge who used to appear in the Hollywood movies at frequent intervals. References: 1. Academy of Achievement, 2011. Mohamed El Baradei. [Online] (Updated 31st Jan 2011) Available at: [Accessed 21st April 2011]. 2. African Success. Biography of Farouk El- Baz. [Online] (Updated 15th Dec 2008) Available at: [Accessed 21st April 2011]. 3. All Voices, 2011. Farouk El-Baz: said that the former Government derives to be beaten by shoes. [online] (Updated 2011) Available at: [Accessed 22nd April 2011]. 4. Huff Post World. 2nd Feb 2011. Transitioning from Revolution to a new Egypt. [Online] (Updated 2011) Available at: [Accessed 22nd April 2011]. 5. The American University in Cairo Press. Naguib Mahfouz 1911-2006. [Online] (Updated 2011) Available at: [Accessed 22nd April 2011]. 6. Today in Literature. Naguib Mahfouz 1911- 2006. [Online] (Updated 2011) Available at: [Accessed 23rd April 2011]. 7. Arab Women Writers. Nawal al- Saadawi. [Online] (Updated 2011) Available at: [Accessed 23rd April 2011]. 8. Democracy Now. 31st Jan 2011. Democracy Now. [Online] (Updated 2011) Available at: [Accessed 23rd April 2011]. 9. Star Pulse. Omar Sharif Biography. [Online] Available at: [Accessed 24th April 2011]. Read More